An Aggravating Reminder of Government Waste on Tax Day

Remember the Spending Quiz from 2010, which asked people to guess whether absurd examples of government waste were true or false?

Well, we have a new video on government waste, though bureaucrats and politicians have become so profligate it doesn’t even bother to trick people with fake examples.

While very well done, I do have two small complaints about the video.

First, it asks whether we should cut spending or raise taxes to deal with the national debt. I think that’s too narrow. We shouldn’t be wasting money even if the budget was balanced and there wasn’t a penny of debt.

Second, the video sort of acquiesces to the dishonest Washington terminology by asking whether we should cut spending or raise taxes, implying those are the only two options. I favor genuine spending cuts, of course, but the most accurate way of phrasing the question is to ask whether we should cut spending, restrain spending, or let government grow on auto-pilot.

12 Responses

The whole government anti-poverty system is a massive waste of taxpayer money that doesn’t do much to help the poor ,as you’ve pointed out before, but here are details from this page:

http://www.politicsdebunked.com/government-fails-the-poor
“Official US Census poverty figures show about 46 million people have been living in poverty the last couple of years, the most ever. The 15% poverty rate is tied for the highest it has been since 1965. The problem isn’t lack of funding.

$195 billion would have been needed last year to simply give everyone enough money to bring their income above the poverty level.
$1030 billion at least was spent on federal anti-poverty programs (including state funding put into those programs).”

Milton Friedman suggested a negative income tax. Another alternative is to make charity a 100% tax credit rather than a deduction so the government needs to compete for your money. It is similar to the idea of school vouchers, and the page describes variations on that theme. After the private sector took over, taxes, and the tax credit, could be reduced to show to a skeptical public that people are still taken care of even without government forcing a certain total to be spent on it.

The government measures poverty relative to other people’s income – very deceptively.

Yet, mathematically, there’s always the bottom 15%. So no matter how much money you give people, there will always be a bottom 15% that you can claim live in poverty. But are they poor? Most if not virtually all Americans who “live in poverty” have air-conditioning, fridges, microwaves, colour TVs, cars, etc, etc.

It’s all a big boon-doggle designed to perpetuate big government, which then continues the inevitable government failure.